The Reign of Olympus (Shadows of Olympus #3)

Chapter Six

My footsteps are almost silent, absorbed by the thick stone floors. I take a turn down a dimly lit corridor and find myself on the threshold of a great hall. It’s immense: a library of sorts. There are constellations mapped all across the ceiling, a great blue-and-silver dome, and shelves as far as the eye can see. They hold scrolls upon scrolls, too many to even begin to count. The rich, dry smell of papyrus fills my lungs. It feels almost sacrilegious to enter, but my feet carry me across the threshold. Tentatively, I touch one of the scrolls, and feel a spark like lightning through my fingers. I don’t dare to bring it out, unravel it, see what ancient knowledge it holds. For all I know, it is like Eros’s face: too divine, too brilliant for mortals to behold.

The next room, too, makes me catch my breath. The walls are lined with shields upon shields, all overlapping each other, each engraved with epic scenes of battles won and lost. Armor, spears, swords, battle-relics: all of them vie for space here. When I glance down, I notice that the floor is a mosaic of maps, but not ordinary maps: battle-maps, intricate and swirling. Looking down at them it seems to me I hear the shouts of men across time: the victorious, the wounded, the dying; the furious battle-cries of those determined to give their all, warriors powered by a greater faith than I can imagine. Athena is a god of many faces, and I’m beginning to understand that all those faces are here, too, in her palace. Knowledge : the dazzling library. Warrior : the room I stand in now.

I walk along the walls of shields, my eyes starting to swim with all the detail, but when I close my eyes to rest them, I hear the clang of metal on metal, and the whirr and scrape of blades carving through the air, or slicing through flesh. I feel light-headed. This room is no good for me. I stumble toward the doorway, lean my hand against it to get my breath.

And find myself facing into another room. A sort of gallery, so long I cannot see the end of it. It’s darker in here, but all around the room the darkness is punctuated with surfaces of moving, shimmering light.

Tapestries . Another of her many faces: Athena the Weaver. They say she has bestowed the people of Athens with her gift, and that you will find no tapestry so beautiful in the mortal realm as those woven by the women of Athens. They say that with every festival, the most skilled women of the city are chosen to make the goddess’s statue a new gown to wear, and that each is more exquisite than the last, beautiful enough to make you weep.

But all that can be nothing compared to what I’m seeing now. These tapestries…they’re unworldly. They seem to shimmer, to move with a light that comes from deep inside them, as though the threads themselves possess some strange fire. And there are so many of them. An infinity of shimmering images, strung all through the dark hall like stars.

I step closer to the nearest one, trying to comprehend what it is I’m seeing. The other tapestries seem to hold images of figures, but this one, the very first of them all, is of nothing I can understand. What’s depicted here has no shape, no structure, nothing my mind can grasp hold of. My head starts to pound; a strange kind of nausea swirls in my stomach.

Chaos . The beginning. The infinity that existed before order, before reason, before Time. I suppose only a god can capture such a thing in a picture. It dances before my eyes, dizzying and unsettling, and quickly I stumble on.

The next tapestries are quicker to decipher. They are the primordial beings, those who emerged from Chaos, creating themselves out of the void. Nyx, night: the first to manifest. Gaia, the earth, who was next to come forth. And then more, and still more. There must be portraits here of every being from the time of Creation. I see the abyss of Tartarus, and the birth of darkness and light. I see sleep and dreaming; the Titans, the Cyclops, the Fates.

They’re dazzling. The more I look at them, the more they seem to move and ripple. To breathe, almost. And I feel as if I, too, am an ancient being, just from looking at them—as though I too can hold all of time inside me, bearing witness to everything that ever was.

I’m beginning to understand what this hall is. These tapestries—they’re not just for beauty’s sake. Before they are woven, the threads are loose, unfixed. But once the loom’s work is done, the order is unshakable, complete. These tapestries are the cosmos in balance. The laws of how things must be.

I don’t know how long I’ve been here, but it seems to me the walls of the room are getting lighter. Perhaps we’re nearing dawn. I no longer feel the cold from the flagstones underfoot. I’m hardly aware of my body at all. Even my thoughts, for a while, have ceased to haunt me; right now I’m not thinking about Deimos, or about my separation from Eros and my present quandary. Even for a moment, it’s a relief.

I move down the line of tapestries, like a gallery of portraits. I see the first father of the gods, Uranus, overthrown by his son, Kronos. I see Kronos in turn overthrown by his son, Zeus. Then the Olympians, who appear with their consorts, paired side by side: Zeus and Hera, Poseidon and Amphitrite, Hades and Persephone. Aphrodite, so beautiful I can hardly look at her, beside Hephaestus, the disfigured blacksmith of Olympus, unhandsome but useful. Zeus married her to him against her will, if the old myths are true. It was Ares she loved—for a while, at least.

I move on, searching out that face that I long to see.

And then there he is. Eros. Unmistakable. Dazzling. His bright eyes gaze out at me from the glimmering threads. My Eros. But…there’s someone else, too. A second figure, a woman, woven side-by-side with him, close enough to touch—just as Hera was with Zeus, just as Persephone was with Hades. The threads fix her in place, permanent, unmoving. His forever.

But the woman is not me.

“There you are.”

I spin around, but I’m light-headed, and almost lose my balance. It’s Athena, standing in the doorway. Watchful, clear-eyed, unblinking.

“Eros-” The words tumble out of me. “He’s here—in your tapestries. But there’s a woman with him. A goddess.”

I can tell just by looking that she’s a goddess. Besides, Athena would never stoop to enshrine a mere mortal in these cosmic tapestries.

Athena joins me in front of the tapestry and looks at it a while, as if admiring her handiwork.

“He never told you?” she says.

“Told me what ?” My voice is back, it seems.

She turns, looks at me, one eyebrow slightly raised.

“She is the goddess Nemese, daughter of Nyx. You’ve heard of her, I assume?”

Perhaps. Vaguely.

“Goddess of retribution? Justice and punishment?” Athena frowns at my ignorance. “She was Eros’s lover. His consort.” She shrugs. “His wife.”

Wife? Lover?

Athena looks at me.

“He is a god. He has been around for many thousands of years. Did you think he spent all that time celibate; that there were none before you?”

I shake my head. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what I thought. Not that he had always been alone…but married ?

I think of Hermes’s wry, curled lip. How he smirked when I insisted that I was Eros’s wife; that we had been married under the Old Laws. I suppose he was not the only one laughing behind my back. Athena frowns.

“You really never knew?”

I will the blood not to flood my face, but it’s no use. But the heat pricking behind my eyes— that , I will not let her see. I cannot.

“It is not in the myths I know,” I manage. “In those, Eros has no consort.”

Athena shrugs. Mortals , she might as well be saying.

“It was long ago. Your people have short memories.” She sighs. “It was thought to be a good match. There was much rejoicing at the time. But in the end…” She shakes her head. “Nemese spends little time on Olympus these days; we do not see much of her. She was a greater goddess once, with many followers. Now she is lesser known.”

It feels as though I’ve been kicked in the stomach. He never told me. How could he not tell me?

“I need some air,” I say. Athena looks at me, and I can see how I appear in her eyes: mortal, unimpressive, fragile.

“Don’t go far,” is all she says.